


yours, always

by dilkirani



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Post-Framework, post-season 4 finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-26
Updated: 2017-05-26
Packaged: 2018-11-05 05:03:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11006550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dilkirani/pseuds/dilkirani
Summary: In prison together, FitzSimmons struggle to move on from the Framework, reconnecting through late night conversations.Based on agent85's prompt: "Jemma asking Fitz: 'Are you still mine?'"





	yours, always

**Author's Note:**

  * For [agent85](https://archiveofourown.org/users/agent85/gifts).



Fitz thinks of all the evenings he longed for her, ashamed of both his lust and his love. He can still feel the ache he buried so deeply within himself it became part of his genetic makeup. He remembers lying on his bed in a cramped bunk, the quiet whir of the plane bleaching to white noise, thinking: _I love you and I want you to be happy, even if it’s not with me._ He remembers the traitorous prayer, washing over him each night as he faded into sleep, when he was at his most vulnerable and could no longer fight it: _But please, please love me back._

He thinks of this and wonders how he could have been so naïve. He’d had so little experience of the world; he didn’t know it was possible to share a bed with someone you loved with your whole heart and still feel empty and alone. He didn’t know it was possible to receive everything you’d ever wished for, only to watch yourself slowly tear it all to shreds.

Maybe things would be different if they weren’t in some mysterious space prison. Maybe on Earth there could be therapy and indefinite leave to a cottage in Perthshire. He imagines it, sometimes, when he feels he deserves the extra punishment. Jemma would smile—like she used to, not this small brittle expression she gives him now, as if he’ll shatter at any moment.

Here they’ve all been separated. He hears murmurings from the guards occasionally, a whispered mention of “Coulson” or a sneering, contemptuous “Little Ms. Quake.” A part of him can’t wait until they’re free and Daisy makes their captors pay, but mostly he keeps his head down and hands Jemma the tools she needs.

As far as he can tell, the menial labor they do only serves to keep this ship/station/rock thing in space. Still, he can’t help the tremors that run through him at the idea that his work, however inconsequential, could be supporting something horrible and he has no idea. He had refused, at first, which landed him in solitary confinement with no food or water until Jemma had been allowed in his cell to beg.

“We’re just keeping ourselves alive,” she’d said. “I can’t find any evidence that what we’re doing in the lab is hurting anyone.”

At his silence she had grabbed his hand. “I promise, and if I’m wrong it’ll be my burden to bear.”

And when he still didn’t respond, she had forced him to look at her and she had cried. “You can’t do this to me,” she said. “You can’t kill yourself like this.”

So now his days follow a steady, unvarying rhythm he’s never before experienced: a shrill, station-wide alarm in the morning, a quick shower, toast and butter with Jemma and a ridiculous number of guards, mindless work in the lab, a thirty-minute lunch break, rotations to fix a keyboard or the wiring in a door panel, dinner with Jemma and a second group of guards, and then lights out in their room.

He has the side of the bed near the wall, and every night he curls as far away from her as he can manage. During the day, they work together seamlessly. Sometimes they even joke, and sometimes he looks at her and for half a second believes they’re back home in their lab, happy and in love, before everything fell apart.

But at night their bodies are too close and he’s never felt more alone. She cries when she thinks he’s asleep, silently, her body barely moving.

He wants to extend a hand and touch her. He wants to hold her and tell her everything will be okay. But he would be lying, and at any rate, he’s lost the right. So he listens to her cry and bites down on his knuckles, hard, to keep himself from reaching for her. Eventually, her shaking subsides into the tortured breathing of her nightmares, and he lets sleep force him under as well.

Every morning he wakes before her to find himself tangled up in her limbs, as if he’s drowning and she’s his life raft, and he hates himself for it.

++

“I saw Daisy,” she whispers, and he turns to face her so she can lower her voice even more, until it barely penetrates the space between them. They had searched extensively and found no bugs in their room, but paranoia is difficult to shake.

“Where?” he asks, and as he does he realizes today marks one month since they’d been captured. He hasn’t seen anyone but Jemma in all that time.

“In B sector. I had to deliver some lab supplies, and she was walking down the hallway with a guard. She smiled at me and she _winked_.”

Fitz frowns. “D’you think that means something?”

Jemma sighs and shifts slightly. He freezes as her arm brushes against his hip. If she notices, she doesn’t say anything. In the library of unsaid things between them, such small moments hardly register anymore.

“I don’t know,” she replies. “Maybe the others are close to figuring out what’s going on. Maybe we’ll get to leave soon.”

He has nothing to say. Hope is no longer a word in his vocabulary. And if he’s honest with himself, which he hardly ever allows, he’s afraid that returning to Earth will sever the only tie he has left to her.

“What would you do first?” she asks, startling him a bit. She rarely pushes past the natural endpoint of their conversations anymore. “When we get back, I mean. What do you miss the most?”

He blinks at her and doesn’t know how to respond. If he could do anything, what would he do? What does his miss? The truth: _I miss you the most._ The unfunny joke: _I would TAHITI myself._ The lie: _I would run away_. Or maybe all of it is the truth, some version of some truth not meant for her ears.

“I’d like to go out,” she continues, a faint blush high on her cheeks. “We could go to that Italian restaurant near our flat. Get dressed up. I’ll finally be able to shave, and I could wear that blue dress you bought me. If you wear my favorite shirt of yours we’d match, which is almost disgustingly cute. And we’ll each order our own dessert because after all this we deserve more than half a slice of tiramisu each.”

She looks at him hesitantly and he suddenly realizes not only is this the longest personal conversation they’ve had since arriving, it’s also the first time she’s spoken as if their future still exists. Or maybe it’s the first time he’s allowed himself to listen. Anything he might say dies somewhere in his throat and her face crumples.

“Forget it,” she whispers, turning onto her back. “It was a stupid game on Maveth, and it’s a stupid game here.” He wishes she would get angry, but she only sounds despondent and that’s infinitely worse.

“I miss…tiramisu,” he finally says. It’s nothing, not even close to the truth of what weighs him down every second of every day, but it’s all he can force past his dry lips.

She cries then, not even attempting to hide, and he nearly turns away. But despite everything, he’s never been able to deny her when she’s this openly heartbroken. He runs a tentative hand over her shoulder, and before he can process it, she’s buried herself in his arms, sobbing against his chest.

He wishes he could set her free.

++

Two nights later, she flicks their bedside lamp on in open defiance of their strict curfew. He looks up at her blearily, and she’s so beautiful in the pale lamplight that he wants, bizarrely, to take her dancing.

“I heard what you said,” she says, her expression tight, revealing nothing. “To AIDA. About our future.”

He swallows thickly. He wonders why she’s bringing this up now, and why she hasn’t before. Maybe she’d still had hope, but now she’s letting him know it’s over.

“I was worried,” she admits, “that maybe you wouldn’t, or couldn’t, but you said…” She cuts herself off with a sigh. Once, he might have understood what she’s trying to say without her speaking it, but his connection to her feels so tenuous now.

She leans forward and for a brief moment he thinks she’s going to kiss him and he realizes that for all his desire for punishment, he would kiss her back. He would take what shouldn’t be his, and he would savor it, like a final meal before a death sentence.

Instead, she rests a hand against his heart. “Are you still mine?” she asks, softly, a secret to be shared between only them.

He wants to say he’s never been anything but hers since he was sixteen years old, but it’s not true anymore. He wants to say that he will be hers until the day he dies, but he loves her too much to allow her to shackle herself to the ghost of a person.

Death, he thinks, is a line in the sand, a single step from existence to nonexistence, as simple as closing your eyes and letting go. If this is a binary state of being, either alive  _or_ dead, what does it mean to have another life and another death stuffed deep within your bones? What can it be called when you were given too many lifetimes to unravel? Somehow, it feels like drowning.

He places a kiss to her cheek, rests his forehead against her shoulder, and says nothing. He wonders if she can feel his heart breaking underneath her palm.

++

“Fitz,” she says, searching his eyes in the glow of a forbidden light. So far, they haven’t been caught, or perhaps after the first few weeks their captors just stopped caring. Every night now she seeks him out and asks a question, and every night he does not answer. He wants to, because she deserves answers, but the words fill up his lungs and his brain can’t process their meaning. It’s like waking up from the coma all over again.

 _Are you still mine?_ she has asked. _Do you think about our future? Do you want to be together when we leave? Do you want to move into our flat? Do you want to leave SHIELD?_

“Fitz,” she says, cupping his face with her hands. Her voice is so smooth it nearly lulls him to sleep. “Do you still love me?”

He tips into her then, face pressed against her collarbone. How can she ask a question that’s never been a question?

“Yes,” he says, his tears pooling in the dip of her neck. “Yes, yes. Isn’t that the problem?”

She runs her fingers through his hair and he shivers involuntarily. “No,” she sighs. “Maybe it’s not the whole solution, but Fitz, that could never be the problem.”

She draws back to look at him and somewhere underneath all the pain he sees the glimmer of a girl who snuck her way into his life and made him the better for it. Still, still, he would follow her anywhere.

“Is this okay?” she asks, placing a finger to his lips and he nods, unable to resist the way he has always been drawn to her, his North Star. She kisses him so softly that it reminds him of nights alone in his bunk, imagining the ghost of a kiss because he could never believe he would deserve more. Because anything more might have destroyed him.

Her lips taste sweet and salty, her tears and sighs and whimpers and aching need indistinguishable from his own. He doesn’t know which of them he’s killing and he doesn’t know why it feels like healing.

++

He wakes before her, once again caught up in her arms. He hates himself a little less.

++

“Fitz.” She says his name over and over, like she’s reclaiming it. He remembers telling her she had no right. He remembers _believing_ she had no right to it, and he can’t understand that because his name has never been safer than in her mouth.

“Yes,” he whispers. His hand is pressed underneath her shirt, desperately connected to her heartbeat. “Yes, I’m still yours. Yes, I think about our future. Yes, I want to be together. Yes, I want to move into our flat. I don’t know. I don’t know how to leave SHIELD. I don’t know what I want.”

“That’s okay,” she tells him. “We have time to figure it out, together.”

He pulls her closer and breathes her in. For the first time in over a decade, she doesn’t smell like her familiar shampoo. It’s strange, to know someone so intimately and yet have to relearn all the same.

“Do you really think we’ll be okay?” He mumbles this into her shoulder, ashamed of being so weak and needy.

“Yes,” she answers without hesitation. “I really do.”

“But how?” He’s always been the romantic, but sometimes he looks at her and sees his war crimes written all over her body. Of all the terrible things he's learned, discovering love can’t always be enough might be the hardest lesson.

She places a kiss to his forehead, like she’s trying to soothe the throbbing of his memories. “Once,” she says, “I lost everything good in my life. I lost all my hope. I thought surviving was enough, but it wasn’t. I thought I would never be happy again. But you _saved_ me, and you made me happier than I’d ever thought possible. Now, it’s my turn.”

She looks at him and he thinks he’s never deserved her. She’s here with him, even in prison, and he’s never deserved a gift like that from the universe.

“Do you believe me?” she asks.

Whatever he’s believed of himself, he has always trusted her. He followed her onto a plane and through a portal to an alien world. When he tried to stay behind, at the bottom of the ocean, in the Framework, she risked everything to save him.

After all this, can’t he take a single step and follow her into their future?

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, I believe you.”


End file.
